Joseph Mallord William Turner, 'Sun Rising through Vapour', before 1807

It is low tide in the early morning and fishermen unload their catch from a boat beached high and dry on the shore. Some people enjoy a meal. Others prepare the catch for sale. This human activity contrasts with the stillness of the glassy sea which, like a mirror, reflects the hazy sunlight. The silvery-white sheen of the water complements the gold-tinted clouds. The pale yellow sun is not yet hot enough to burn off the sea mist – the ‘vapour’ referred to in the picture’s title – which gives the large warships in the background an almost ghostly aura. On the horizon (centre right), you can just see a faint plume of smoke as a ship fires a morning gun.

A drawing inscribed ‘Study / Calm’ in his ‘Calais Pier’ sketchbook of about 1802–5 shows that Turner settled on the painting’s theme and composition early on. A ‘calm’ (a smooth sea) was a favourite subject in Dutch marine painting – for example, van de Velde’s Dutch Ships in a Calm, also in the National Gallery’s collection. As a study of a calm, Turner’s painting was a departure from the wild storms of his earlier marine pictures such as Calais Pier. Instead of combining dramatic action with a dynamic handling of paint, Turner used rich colours laid down as finely painted surfaces to create a tranquil, even slightly elegiac, mood. This ability to paint the sea in contrasting states further consolidated his reputation as primarily a ‘great sea-painter’. The emphatic focus on the sun as the source of light is a feature of several of Turner’s compositions, but here he also adds incidental details such as the objects on the beach, including an anchor, driftwood and stranded marine life.

The work of Dutch painters, including Aelbert Cuyp and Willem van de Velde, is also evoked by the boats and figures – an influence acknowledged by the picture’s later title, Dutch Boats, when it was exhibited in Turner’s own gallery in 1810. Some of the figures, especially, resemble those painted by David Teniers the Younger, particularly the hunched figure wearing a red Flemish cap seen from behind. Such details imply that Turner intended to suggest a Dutch setting, but not necessarily a specific location. As one contemporary noted, Holland’s North Sea coast faced west, so it would not have been possible to see a sunrise over the open sea from the mainland.

Turner himself had great affection for the painting. It was bought by Sir John Leicester, one of his major patrons, but when Sir John’s estate was sold at auction upon his death in 1827 Turner bought it back for a higher price. In his second will, made in 1831, Turner specified that the picture, together with his Dido building Carthage, should hang ‘in perpetuity’ in the newly built National Gallery alongside Claude’s A Seaport and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. Turner revisited the subject when, around 1809, he painted a smaller modified version, Sun rising through Vapour, which is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.